Students found campus 'Ebay' to help clear your clutter

2 April 2015

If discarded textbooks, DVDs, records, and clothes are making your room seem more like a storage unit than somewhere to live, two Aston undergraduates have launched an online marketplace for students that could solve your problem.

Abid Tejani and Neil Kumar are the founders of StudentClutter.com, a universal online platform for students to buy and sell items on their university campus.

The pair trial launched the website in their second year at Aston after finding themselves surrounded by the ‘clutter’ of unused furniture and coursebooks for modules they had already completed.

The website received thousands of views in just a few months, with many Aston students posting adverts on the site for items they wanted to sell. The trial’s success convinced Abid and Neil they were onto a winning idea.

They developed the website further, allowing student businesses to post adverts offering their services. The young entrepreneurs also successfully submitted StudentClutter to the Virgin Start-Up scheme, a not-for-profit organisation founded by Sir Richard Branson to support new businesses. Virgin provided Abid and Neil with a mentor to help them develop their business and financial plan as they look to secure funding from the Government’s StartUp Loans scheme.

Abid, a final year Business and Management student, said: “Living in a cluttered space is a problem which affects many, if not most, students at some point during their university lives. A messy room can really hamper your productivity and ability to organise yourself. Neil and I set-up StudentClutter to tackle this issue, letting fellow students declutter their lives and make some money in the process.

“We are very excited for the future. We have dreamed about owning our own company for a long time and now we have the opportunity to make a real success out of it. We want StudentClutter to be the ‘go to’ platform for all students, like how eBay is when one thinks about buying and selling online.”

The young entrepreneurs have big ambitions for their fledgling business. They intend to implement StudentClutter in every university in the UK, where they hope to replicate the success of the website among students at Aston.

Although the website is primarily aimed at students, university staff may also use the online marketplace. Items currently listed for sale include a HP Chrombook, a pair of Dr Martens, an iPad 2, a Kindle Fire HDX and a dumbbell set.